Choosing Joy Over AI Discourse

The most viral thread I’ve had on Mastodon is one where I criticize vibecoding and how it’s resulting in a glut of bad, harmful software.

Inspired by the attention, I started cooking up a longer blog post on the subject. I was going to tear into the LLM companies’ sale pitches, rant about how they’re lying about what their products could do.

My initial drafts were sarcastic and angry. I even came up with a snarky graphic, based on an ad campaign from 20 years ago that surely everybody remembers:

I was on fire! And then, a couple of days ago, just before I was going to sit down and finish the blog post, I read Iris Meredith’s article What’s left to say.

Iris writes about how exhausted she is about both LLMs and as well as the discourse around them. She points out that we, in our hatred of LLMs, spend all our time criticizing them instead of creating the things that we say we care about in the first place.

That knocked the wind right out of my sails. My righteous anger evaporated, leaving behind it a realization: angry blog posts aren’t the kind of thing I want to be putting out in the world.

Anger has always come easily to me. I’ve struggled my whole life with my temper, and while I have far fewer temper tantrums than I did as a child, it’s still always something I have to work on. These days, since I can generally control my outbursts, my anger is sneakier. It worms its way out in tendrils of sarcasm and cutting words.

It always feels good. I felt clever making that Geico photoshop up there. It’s a powerful thing, feeling justified in your rage, being egged on by people around you (or online).

And yet, what was the outcome of that blog post going to be? It certainly wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind. The only people who would’ve stomached reading it would be those who already agreed, those who were already angry. In this way, the anger spreads like a virus, eating us all from the inside out.

Don’t get me wrong, anger can be useful. It’s motivating, and when controlled and harnessed towards action it can get results. I think most social change has come, at least in part, from rage at the injustice of the world around us.

But when that anger is rudderless, when the only action you take is to vent it into the world, you don’t actually change anything. You only hurt yourself and the people around you.

I didn’t make this blog to do that. I made it to spread joy, to share the things I create, to help teach people some of the skills others have taught me.

Thank you, Iris, for reminding me of that.

So what am I going to do instead?

Firstly, I’m going to try and filter out articles about AI in my social media feeds and /blogroll. I feel like I have all the information I need to form my opinion about LLMs, and reading more is just draining me.

One area where I’m not going to disengage with the LLM discourse is in my real life conversations. It seems like everytime I tell somebody that I work(ed?) in tech, they want to talk LLMs with me. I’m fucking sick of it, but it’s where I feel like my words will have the most impact, so I’ll keep trying. If anybody has any tips on how to have more effective conversations about this stuff, please let me know.

Other than that, I’m going to take the energy that I was wasting hating, and put it towards my workshops and art.

I’m going to keep teaching my Make Your First Website class, where students learn the basics of HTML and CSS, no prior experience required. The conversations I’ve had with people that come to this class have been wonderful and have, more than anything else, restored my hope that we might be able to turn this tech dystopia around.

I also hope to restart my NFC Sculpture workshops, so keep an eye out for that. If you’re in Philly, I’d love it if you stopped by!

On the art front, I hereby declare June 2026 my Month of Interactive Fiction!

I cut my teeth on one Twine game thing, NSFW Calisthenics, a few months ago, and want to make more! This time with a focus on actual, ya know, gameplay. I hope to release a couple of little games by the end of June, so stay tuned!

I also might take the month as an excuse to learn Inform, and make a parser game. Maybe a little Counterfeit Monkey fan level?

Finally, I’m going to engage more with the people and organizations around me.

My partner and I have been dealing with some health problems that have been taking a lot of our spoons (if you really want to see me rage, ask about the US healthcare system), and I’d much rather be focusing on that than on AI discourse.

Similarly, there’s lots of cool organzing going on in Philly (both in the tech scene, and in more politics/mutual aid focused spaces), and I feel like I’ve lost some momentum in the past few months. It’s been more due to the health stuff than anything else, but still, I want to get back to it!

I hope to see you all out there, finding your own joy. Look after yourselves, everybody!